Salem's Lot (1979) on Netflix
Ben Mears comes home to a small Maine town to write about the Marsten House, a hilltop property the locals call haunted. New owners take the house, and townspeople begin to vanish.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.8/1032,416 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes88%
Trailer
Plot summary
Ben Mears, a successful author, comes back to his hometown of Salem's Lot, Maine, after years away, intending his next novel to center on the Marsten House, the hilltop property the town believes is haunted. As a boy he broke into the house and saw a ghostly figure there. The Marsten House has already been bought by Richard Straker, a newcomer opening an antique shop with a partner, Kurt Barlow, whom nobody has seen. Mears settles at Eva Miller's boarding house, begins a romance with the local woman Susan Norton, and reconnects with his old schoolteacher Jason Burke, telling him the house draws evil. Then a crate arrives at the Marsten House one night, and people in town begin to disappear and to die.
Cast
- Barney McFaddenas Ned Tibbets
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Salem's Lot (1979)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Producer Richard Kobritz and screenwriter Monash followed the general outline of King's novel but changed some elements, turning head vampire Kurt Barlow from a cultured, human-looking villain into a speechless, demonic-looking monster.
- Casting Cook and Windsor as a couple was an inside joke by producer Kobritz, a fan of Stanley Kubrick: the two had previously played a couple in Kubrick's The Killing in 1956.
- Producer Richard Korbitz achieved the vampires' floating effects by placing the actors on a boom crane rather than using visible wires, aiming for a spooky sense of floating without giving away the trick.
- Writer Bryan Fuller said the scene in which a character is impaled on a deer's antlers frightened him so much as a child that he staged a similar scene in his 2013 TV series Hannibal.
- While made for television, the production simultaneously shot a more violent alternate cut intended for theatrical release in Europe.
